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On November 06 2013 01:52 Destructicon wrote:
MMO's are a relatively new game genre, in the sense that, unlike FPS, RTS, RPG and Driver genres, MMO's are little over a decade old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD *cough*
I do agree that MMOs suffered the most from casualization, I think asia plays a big part in it aswell, really pushing the grindy aspects of those games. In the end it is buisness as usuall, people are tired from work and don`t want to be challanged, some even find the most repetetiv aspects of these games relaxing. Captilism produces the product in demand, in case of MMOs it also is the reason why they are in demand in their current shape.
Who really has time to put in 5 hours every day into something that constantly demands thoughtful interaction? Thats what those wallmart jobs are for. 
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so i love eve online cause theres no story. and i hate every story element in every other mmo. the typical wow combat mechanics seem retarded to me and i hate them. i also hate lots of the grinding in mmos, although im not opposed to grinding per se (fanatic diablo2 player). so i'm totally with you in all your critiscism.
but for fucks sake drop the drama. the game industry grew by orders of magnitude during the time mmos rose. no matter how shit the ratio between braindead mmo/genius rpg becomes, there are still more and bigger genius rpgs in absolute numbers.
as for rts, i dont know what the fuck happened but im very, very unsure if mmos are to blame. people apparently dont like big, difficult rtses anymore. it might that before, gamers were smart nerds to a large degree, while now, we're average in every way. before, rts was some of the coolest things you could create gamewise, whereas now, you can get more satisfaction from gfx fests and big explosions.
but then again, rts is far from dead anyway.
it doesn't matter that 90% of players and the industry are interested in call of warfare: modern dooties and wowclone#4563, theres enough anyway.
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Great write up! I can agree with almost all parts.
I still remember when i was raiding Upper Black Rock Spire all the time for weeks in the night just to get the hide of that one boss corehound. When I finally had it I really felt good and sth. special. What a waste of time!
It is addictive. I don´t get close to lay my fingers on MMOs ever again. I simply know it better now, since I also know that I was an addicted at that time.
Never again.
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storytelling in mmos is obviously different.
The problems I have with MMOS in general is that there's too much work to get to the actual interesting stuff. I tried Eve once or twice but it was just too open and confusing to wrap my head around, even with help from the TL Eve Group. MMOS are more social things anyway so it really depends on having a group. I love the ideas of MMOS and have tried a ton but never really found one that worked personally.
decent read but I think you're being too hard on certain parts.
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On November 06 2013 19:28 floi wrote:Show nested quote +On November 06 2013 09:08 Impervious wrote:
Nice job lumping all MMO's into the same category..... Try playing Eve online. It has a lot of faults, no doubt, but it's an incredible game. I'd actually be interested in a more elaborated response regarding the points raised by the op from someone who has more experience with EVE than I do. For example, I wonder it the player-driven "story" in EVE is anything more than eternal conflict and changing control over space regions. Or is it more about the ingame politics of alliances, loyalty and betrayal?
Eve is a sandbox. Everything you do in the game affects others, however slightly.
People who are smart can find ways to siphon isk into their wallets because of that. A great example was Kwark's two trillion isk scam. You aren't profiting on just your own actions, you're profiting off of the actions of every single person that donates isk to you.
I got hooked on Eve because of the market system. I was an atrocious pilot, and coincidentally am still pretty terrible by good pvper's standards, yet I was capable of making tons of isk for myself as a relative newbie to the game because I was smart enough to make some small market manipulations. Within my first month, I was not only able to pay for my own subscription, but able to get started on 2 separate alt accounts and able to reliably plex them (use in-game currency to buy game time that other people purchase with real money and sell on the in-game market to make their isk), plus afford pretty much whatever I wanted to fly. The market pvp is intense, but it can be a lot of fun if you're the type that likes seeing battles take place on excel spreadsheets rather than in simulated space fights. But the ship PvP is super fun too. I didn't realize how fun it was until I started to get better at it.
I don't login very often right now, but one of the recent fights I got was 4 relative newbies in frigates take me on in my own frigate. I killed 2 of them and nearly got a 3rd before their leader called for them to scatter. Yes, you can take on a 4v1 or more in equal ship classes and come out that far ahead. And in this case, I wasn't abusing fancy implants, warfare links, faction mods, hell, I didn't even carry Quafe (a cheap, basic, and very effective combat booster). It gets even more insane when you start taking that stuff into consideration. I can't think of another game (other than RTS's) that allows player skill and decision making to make that much of an effect in the outcome of a fight. And, now, let me reiterate that relative to the good pvper's in this game, I am terrible.
I don't give a shit about the ingame politics. I don't have time to keep up with all that crap. As it is, the game's too big and there's too much to do to bother worrying about that stuff.
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Damn you and kwark - after reading both the article and your post I soooo wanna start playing again (and properly this time)...
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I played WoW for 5 years. Raided fairly seriously. Played Diablo 2 while in high school. I totally agree about the Skinner Box mechanics (especially for Diablo 2, at least with WoW there is an endgame). After quitting WoW, I had a huge amount of time that opened up. I got into Skyrim and dabbled in SWTOR and Guild Wars 2 a bit. What faults MMORPGs have in storytelling, you can make up for in exploration.
The GW2 dynamic events not actually changing the world, but you can get experience by doing almost anything; crafting, gathering, killing enemies, reviving allies, finding waypoints and vistas, as well as whatever heart tasks need to be done. I find the exploration aspect of GW2 to be great and much better than the combat or WvW. Getting to each vista usually involved a mini jumping puzzle and there are more complicated jumping puzzles hidden throughout the world (unfortunately precision platforming in the game is not the best).
I do agree that SWTOR was hindered by being an MMO. The leveling experience and player story was great (combat was meh but it was good enough, guess I was used to it coming from WoW). I would go back to it periodically if the F2P model they use weren't so awful.
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I've never heard of this rat experiment, the Skinner box. That's interesting. I guess this idea of fun is really less magical than we make it seem.
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EPT
